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Literature Insights
General Editor: Charles Moseley
William Shakespeare
Hamlet
John Lennard
‘The final
testimony
to Shakespeare’s
generosity is how
much he leaves up
to the actors’

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© John Lennard, 2007
The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published by Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk
Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE
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ISBN 978-1-84760-028-8

William Shakespeare: Hamlet
John Lennard
Literature Insights. Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007

A Note on the Author
John Lennard took his B.A. and D.Phil. at Oxford University, and his M.A. at Washington
University in St Louis. He has taught in the Universities of London, Cambridge, and
Notre Dame, and for the Open University, and is now Professor of British & American
Literature at the University of the West Indies—Mona. His publications include But I
Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (Clarendon Press,
1991), The Poetry Handbook (1996; 2/e, OUP, 2005), and with Mary Luckhurst The
Drama Handbook (OUP, 2002). He is the general editor of the Genre Fiction Sightlines
and Monographs series, and has written Sightlines on works by Reginald Hill,
Walter Mosley, Octavia E. Butler, and Ian McDonald. His critical collection Of Serial
readers and other essays on genre fiction (2007), published simultaneously with this
e-book, launches the Monographs Series.

Contents
A Note on the Author
Preface
A note on the texts of Hamlet
Acts and scenes in the Arden 3 Q2 Hamlet
Part 1. Approaching Shakespeare
1.1 A Man of the Jacobethan Theatre
1.2 Companies—Actors—Stages—Audiences
1.3 Venus and Lucrece
1.4 Errors and Two Gentlemen
Part 2. Approaching Hamlet
2.1 Revenge with Complications
2.2 A Play by Shakespeare
Part 3. Actors and Players
3.1 Old Hamlet / the Ghost
3.2 Horatio
3.3 Claudius
3.4 Gertrude
3.5 Polonius
3.6 Laertes
3.7 Ophelia
3.8 Rosencrantz & Guildenstern
3.9 The gravediggers
3.10 Osric
3.11 Fortinbras
3.12 Hamlet
3.13 “The best players in the world”

Part 4. Acts and Devices
4.1 Acts
4.2 Scenes
4.3 Soliloquy and Colloquy
4.4 Verse, Prose, and Song
4.5 Metatheatre
4.6 Doubling
4.7 Special Effects
4.8 Exits
Part 5. Hamlet and Twelfth Night
Part 6. Critics’ Corner
6.1 Bibliography
6.2 Web-sites
Hyperlinked Materials
serious doubt
theatre-space
breath-length
discovery-space
comedic and tragedic modes
Vice
Inconclusive
Speculation
Blackfriars
Ciceronian periods

Preface
Like much in the modern world, Hamlet has acquired a tendency to become obese. In
the Arden 2 Shakespeare, Harold Jenkins’s edition was twice the width of every other
play; in Arden 3, Ann Thompson’s and Neil Taylor’s edition is in two volumes, jointly
twice as wide as Jenkins’s one, and such remorseless bulking is an unhappy trend.
The play can also expand in performance: a fine 2001 Royal Shakespeare Company
(RSC) stage-production (directed by Steven Pimlott and starring Sam West) ran over
four hours with two intervals, and Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 film-adaptation, lasting
a whopping 242 minutes, is rarely watched from start to finish, especially in one go.
Still more off-puttingly for students, Hamlet criticism has the same expansiveness.
This Literature Insight is determinedly short. Great need not mean ponderous,
and on stage Hamlet (like most Shakespeare) almost always does better at a brisk
canter than a solemn march. In dealing with something as complex as the world’s
premier Early Modern tragedy simplicity is not always useful; straightforwardness
and cogency almost always are, so scholarly problems are ruthlessly relegated to
references, while links in the bibliography make available to interested readers the
primary materials, that they may see for themselves what the evidence supports.
Casting matters are trickier, for there is almost no evidence about the first casting of
any of Shakespeare’s plays, and most of what is said is pure speculation. But someone
first played each role, and a pool of most probable names is known: so the game
can be compulsive. It is in no way necessary, but a grasp of the practical necessities
and constraints Shakespeare faced in writing (which for a working playwright of his
kind means casting) is very helpful, and inevitably brings more speculative territory
into view. So sometimes I speculate, but only in footnotes or link-text, and in Part 6,
where it is properly flagged and discussion can be as careful as it need.
Plot-summaries etc. are widely available, so I assume readers have read Hamlet
at least once and know what happens. The only special thing readers—particularly
those without theatrical experience—are asked to do is to think seriously about the
There have been three series of Arden editions: the second appeared 1946–82, the third began to
appear in 1993.
‘Early Modern’: for historians, the period 1500–1700; ‘Modern’ = 1700–present.

Hamlet
business of acting in a particular space. If possible, visit a theatre, any theatre, sit,
breathe, look, and absorb its design. Follow these links to images of a classical
amphitheatre, Roman stage, pageant-wagon, and Elizabethan amphitheatre,
and just look at each hard for a minute. Shakespeare’s Hamlet has over four centuries
been done in, on, and round about all of them, and many stranger venues besides,
and no performance is ever independent of the physical and institutional structures
that enable and frame it—buildings, stages, actors, and audiences. If these things are
missing from your imagined understanding of the play’s text/s, it will (rightly) seem
to you as lifeless as a TV without power; but turn the current on …
A note on the texts of Hamlet
There are three ‘early texts’ of Hamlet: Q1 (1603), the so-called ‘Bad Quarto’, which
at c.2000 lines is half the length of the others and very different; Q2 (1604), the
‘Good Quarto’ of c.3700 lines; and F (1623), the ‘Folio text’ of c.3550 lines from the
first collected Shakespeare, which drops c.230 of Q2’s lines, adds c.70 of its own, and
(slightly) changes many more. Since the nineteenth century there has also been an
‘eclectic’ or ‘composite’ text of c.3850 lines, generated by editors who combine all
lines in Q2 and F with some lines and stage-directions from Q1.
My references are to the Arden 3 Hamlet edited by Ann Thompson & Neil Taylor
(2 vols, London: Thompson Learning, 2006), and usually to its (modernised) Q2 text
(in vol. 1); when the Q1 or F texts (in vol. 2) are cited, the reference indicates this.
I have also therefore followed the scene-numbering and act-division of the Arden 3
text; in other editions 1.4–5 may be combined, as may any of 4.1–4 (which in F form
3.5–7). For ease of reference a summary of Arden 3’s acts and scenes is given below.
All other Shakespearean references are to the Riverside text, 2 nd edition, 1997.
Readers are reminded that lines per scene and role vary with editions, and that
‘verse-lines’ (i.e. complete iambic pentameters) divided between two or three speakers
may count in two or three roles—so totals may seem not to tally. All line-counts
given are my own, and derive from the Arden 3 Q2 text.
External Hyperlinks appear in blue + underline; internal hyperlinks also have the symbol ►.
Including a ship in 1607: see http://www.as.ua.edu/english/strode/articles/taylor/hamlet3.htm
For a longer discussion of Shakespearean editing, using Hamlet 5.1 as an example, see John
Lennard & Mary Luckhurst, The Drama Handbook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), ch. 3.
Line-counts cannot be absolute because methods of counting stage-directions, headings, blank
lines, and part-lines that are or end complete speeches vary.

Hamlet
Acts and scenes in the Arden 3 Q2 Hamlet
Act 1
Scene 1: Barnardo, Francisco, Marcellus, Horatio, Ghost
Scene 2: Claudius, Gertrude, Voltemand, Cornelius, Polonius, Laertes, Hamlet
(O that this too too sallied flesh), Horatio, Barnardo*, Marcellus
Scene 3: Laertes, Ophelia, Polonius
Scene 4: Horatio, Marcellus, Hamlet, Ghost
Scene 5: Hamlet, Ghost, Horatio, Marcellus*
Act 2
Scene 1: Polonius, Reynaldo*, Ophelia
Scene 2: Claudius, Gertrude, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Voltemand*,
Cornelius*, Polonius, Hamlet (O, what a rogue …), Players
Act 3
Scene 1: Claudius, Gertrude, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Polonius, Ophelia,
Hamlet (To be, or not to be)
Scene 2: Claudius, Gertrude, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Polonius, Ophelia,
Hamlet, Horatio, Players*
Scene 3: Claudius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Polonius, Hamlet
Scene 4: Gertrude, Polonius†, Hamlet, Ghost* (‘closet scene’)
Act 4
Scene 1: Claudius, Gertrude, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern
Scene 2: Hamlet, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern
Scene 3: Claudius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Hamlet
Scene 4: Fortinbras, Captain*, Rosencrantz*, Guildenstern*, Hamlet (How all
occasions do inform …)
Scene 5: Gertrude, Gentleman, Horatio, Ophelia*, Claudius, Messenger, Laertes
(‘mad scene’)
Scene 6: Horatio, Gentleman*, Sailors*
Scene 7: Claudius, Laertes, Messenger*, Gertrude (There is a willow …)
Act 5
Scene 1: Gravediggers*, Hamlet, Horatio, Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes, Priest*
Scene 2: Hamlet†, Horatio, Osric, Claudius†, Gertrude†, Laertes†, Fortinbras
* last appearance † dies

Part 1. Approaching Shakespeare
1.1 A Man of the Jacobethan Theatre
The basic facts of William Shakespeare’s life—birth in 1564, education at Stratford
Grammar, marriage to Anne Hathaway (1556–1623), children, work, death in 1616—
are perfectly clear and without serious doubt ►; but detail of any kind is almost nonexistent,
and what there is is dubious or unhelpful. For a man born in the mid-sixteenth
century this is already a notably full record—Shakespeare has attracted millions of
hours of research, and Early Modern English records are better than most—but there
is, blazingly, one thing more: that Shakespeare’s central passion, occupation, art, and
craft was the Jacobethan theatre, dominantly the public amphitheatres. As actor,
sharer, and resident dramatist of the Lord Chamberlain’s / King’s Men he was a
major player in a particular emergent art, craft, and trade about which much is known
and more can be inferred.
A basic problem in imagining the Jacobethan theatre is that the closure of all
English theatres from 1642–60 severed professional continuity; theatres built after
1660 were strongly influenced by continental European models dominated by perspectival
scenery—quite different from the London amphitheatres of Shakespeare’s
day. All older English plays struggled after 1660, losing as much as gaining in being
forcibly adapted for and into the new theatre—a change bluntly recorded in the shift
from going, as Elizabethans did, to hear a play, as auditors in an audience, to going
(as we still do) to see a play, as spectators of something we hope will be spectacular.
Susanna, 1583–1649; fraternal twins Hamnet, 1585–96, and Judith, 1585–1662.
‘Jacobethan’: a portmanteau of Elizabethan (in the reign of Elizabeth I, 1558–1603) and Jacobean
(James VI & I, 1603–25), used because Shakespeare’s working life straddles the reigns.
‘Sharer’: Like partners in a modern professional practice, sharers invested a substantial sum to buy
their share, entitling them to a percentage of net receipts. There were eight sharers in Shakespeare’s
company who probably played larger roles in most plays, while minor ones were played by hired
men.
‘Lord Chamberlain’s’ / ‘King’s Men’: Under Elizabeth, the official patron of the company to which
Shakespeare belonged was from 1594 the Lord Chamberlain, so they were the ‘Lord Chamberlain’s
Men’; after 1603 King James assumed that role himself, so the company became the ‘King’s
Men’.

Hamlet 11
So there has since 1660 been a particular sensory and intellectual gap, and to meet
Shakespeare on his own ground (where he makes fullest, most immediate sense)
modern readers must be aware of auditing as well as spectating, and of the theatreworld
that supported Shakespeare’s full, passionate, and successful career.
Perhaps the most obvious thing about that theatre-world is its energy. London was
buzzing, and throughout Shakespeare’s career (c.1590–1613) remained the largest,
most innovative city in Europe. Trade, war, expansion, investment—and new ways
of investing—were powerful drivers. England as a whole had also forcibly stopped
an activity that had long been important, and the impulses it had satisfied needed
a new outlet. Under Roman Catholicism theatre was sacred: mystery cycles were
performed in public procession at their time in the liturgical round, while morality
plays taught doctrine and miracle plays celebrated exemplary lives. Many people
acted and very many more audited, so when Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1533 he
couldn’t simply suppress traditions of sacred performance—but the Catholic doctrine
and faith they celebrated could only be a problem for an Anglican monarch, so the
weight slowly came on, and there is no known English performance of a complete
cycle after Coventry in 1574.
That date should give pause, for the mystery cycles and morality plays are often
firmly labelled as mediaeval, as they are in origin—but they were performed into
Shakespeare’s lifetime, and he certainly knew about them. Just as importantly, many
people he spoke to, worked with, and wrote for were also familiar with the cycles
and their performance: but in 1575 the cycles were no more, and theatre will out.
The man with the good timing, right idea, and persuasive tongue was James Burbage
(d.1597), and the idea he had was in all fundamentals the modern theatre. What may
most surprise is just how original an idea it was.
Greek theatre, like the mystery cycles, was sacred and classical amphitheatres
part of temple-complexes, while Roman theatre was mostly political, usually a poor
relation of gladiatorial sports, and always a matter of direct patronage and official
subsidy. Travelling players in the middle ages have left no trace of any permanent
stages, so what Burbage wanted in 1576 was radical: a large, purpose-built structure
owned and run by professional actors, to be funded through commercial performances.
Preconditions for such a venture include a sufficiently large and wealthy catchment
area, a workable design for the building, a pool of (would-be) actors, writers able to
The ‘porter’ scene in Macbeth (2.3) is based on the ‘Harrowing of Hell’ in the mystery cycles,
when ‘devil-porters’ are disturbed by Jesus hammering on the gates—but the specificity of this
well-known example tends to mask rather than emblematise the far wider and deeper connection
between the ‘mysteries and moralities (d.1574)’ and the ‘Shakespearean Stage (b.1576)’.

Hamlet 12
supply a stream of new plays, a team to handle production, finance, and the public
once admitted, the blessings of central government and local authority, and a financier
willing to lend you a very large sum on the strength of these plans … but Burbage
pulled it off, and built in Shoreditch, just east of the City of London, what was simply
called The Theatre.
It had to be outside the City wall because the City Fathers had religious beliefs
(and social convictions) that led them to disapprove of theatre in all forms, but even in
Shoreditch other restrictions applied. A great show-woman herself, Queen Elizabeth
knew very well just what theatricality could achieve politically, and plays for public
performance had to be licensed by her Master of the Revels; offenders could and did
find themselves in prison for a month or three, and any playwright venturing towards
religion or recognisably current politics did so at their (and the actors’) peril. But it all
worked! Within two years a second theatre, The Curtain, was providing competition,
and the 1580s saw steady growth, however measured, so by the time Shakespeare
came to London, probably in the later 1580s, the stage was in every way set for him.
A body of actors had emerged for whom increasingly talented and professionally
assured playwrights were beginning to write great roles, and company structures had
been created that for the sharers were beginning to produce real wealth. Above all,
Londoners had taken to the new entertainment in a big way, and the acting profession,
despite its perennial insecurities, was already entrenched in popular and elite cultures.
That was the working world Shakespeare entered, and as sharer-playwright of the
premier company from 1594–1613 bestrode.
1.2 Companies—Actors—Stages—Audiences
Theatre is always, of necessity, a practical group business. When it is also putting
food on the actors’ tables, and must finance a building as well as covering the initial
and running costs of performance, there is no room for mavericks or spendthrifts—yet
much about theatre seems to attract, and worse to need and benefit from, people with
exactly those qualities. The main answer to this conundrum in Shakespeare’s day was
the company, a professional business in which individual interests were merged and
individual commitments had to follow. Next to nothing is known about Shakespeare’s
career as an actor, so he clearly did not strike his contemporaries as an outstanding
stage-performer, but it was as an actor able to put up the necessary cash that he gained
his position in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men—and only that position, held as an actor

Hamlet 13
for nearly twenty years, enabled the particular, steady writing career that followed.
Shakespeare’s had started writing plays before he began to do so exclusively for the
Lord Chamberlain’s Men, but most if not all his earlier plays were for them, so he was
to all intents and purposes a (one-)company playwright. His plain duty in writing was
therefore to write for his fellow-sharers, providing in each drama roles that played
to strengths, stretched talents, masked weaknesses, and for the company added up to
lots of repeat customers. Finance and theatre-space ► allowed him, in addition to
six or eight major roles for himself and his fellow-sharers, up to six hired players for
bit-parts etc., and four boys, and all but one of his 37 plays fit that pattern. Of course
they also fit infinitely greater, more interesting patterns, but however soaring their
ambitions and achievements, the articulating cast of each could be varied only within
limits—generous by the standards of modern theatre (which tends to smaller casts),
but for Shakespeare a constantly necessary discipline of theatrical creation.
At a company level the inevitable tension of mutual obligation and the egoism
of performance is reflected in the sharp opinions Shakespeare gave Hamlet about
actors who speak “more then is set down for them […] though in the meantime,
some necessary question of the play be then to be considered. – That’s villainous and
shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it” (3.2.36–42). The dilemma is
sharp: if you want to get the best out of actors you must give them a creative job to
do, but to make that job possible something much more dictatorial is required. Many
actors will play Shakespeare, but relatively few can, in sober fact, produce coherent
interpretations of his major roles: they are genuinely very demanding, and it is clear
that Shakespeare must have pushed his core sharer-actors hard throughout his career.
Richard Burbage (c.1567–1619), James Burbage’s younger son and the company’s
star actor, did something so distinct in playing the major roles Shakespeare wrote
for him that he began to be described not as ‘playing’ but as ‘personating’; during
his and Shakespeare’s careers a greater, parallel change occurred as mere ‘players’
(musicians, entertainers) became ‘actors’ (doers of dramatic deeds).
Additionally, and very oddly, English women were not then permitted to act in
public, so the female roles in all plays of 1576–1642 had to be taken by beardless
boys; not ‘in drag’ in the modern sense, but nevertheless cross-dressed and known
by all to be so. A great deal has been written about this strange rule and what it might
signify; here the cogent fact is simply that for Shakespeare (as for all writers and
Both as a solo writer and in his even rate of production Shakespeare was (very) unusual.
The exception is Richard III, which seems to have been written for a double-size company.
The elder son, Cuthbert (1566–1636), handled company administration.

Hamlet 14
actors) boys playing women of all ages was a fixed condition of performance. Little
is known about individual boys, but the companies’ main source of supply was choir
schools, as the many songs in female roles attest; the potent tragedy of some roles
also makes it clear that comparisons with modern ‘drag’ acts or school plays will not
do, and that the boys were a true theatrical resource. But exclusion of women was a
severe craft limitation that Shakespeare probably found as irksome as Shakespeare in
Love suggests; there is certainly a case that he was careful in writing his female roles
not to demand the kind of breath-length ► he could from Burbage and the other fullgrown
adults, and in many plays his heroines voice sharp complaint at (performative)
restrictions on women.
At the same time, as theatre-goers familiar with reconstructed amphitheatres will
know, exclusion of women was theatrically a lesser problem than it would be today,
because Shakespeare’s theatre did not depend on illusion—the presentation of a
fiction as ‘real’. His audiences did not sit in warm, covered darkness, gazing through
a proscenium arch into the illuminated world beyond: they stood in the open air or
sat in open galleries, certainly on three and perhaps all four sides of a stage, watching
by afternoon-light and so constantly seeing one another as well as the actors. There
was no convention of silence during performance, dis/pleasure would have been
freely expressed, and Hamlet’s complaint about clowns ad-libbing points to freedoms
of reception as well as performance, so Coleridge’s famous tag about the “willing
suspension of disbelief” simply doesn’t apply to the Shakespearean stage. Audiences
knew full well at all times what was/n’t real, and cannot have ‘suspended disbelief’;
rather they ran belief (faith, credit) and disbelief (reason, knowledge) always in jointharness,
and seem not to have distinguished boy-plays-woman from commoner-playsking,
living-plays-dead, or a London stage playing Rome, Damascus, or wherever
was needed for a given performance.
It is this duality between expansive fiction and constraining reality amongst both
audiences and actors that underpins the ‘metatheatre’ often noted in Shakespeare
in plays that have ‘plays-within-plays’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet) or
‘boys-playing-girls-playing-boys’ (As You Like It, Twelfth Night). These are certainly
metatheatrical devices, forcefully reminding audiences to think about what they and
A few older female roles, notably the comic nurse in Romeo and Juliet, are thought to have been
played by adults, but all others, from Juliet to Cleopatra, by boys.
Biographia Literaria (1817), ch. 14; Coleridge was actually discussing the process of reading poetry,
not the business of attending drama—on which see his ‘Remarks on the stage’ (1808) and lecture
of 1818–19, both in e.g. R. A. Foakes, ed., Coleridge’s Criticism of Shakespeare: A Selection
(London: Athlone Press, 1989).

Hamlet 15
the actors are presently doing—but so are every use of the words ‘act’, ‘scene’, and
‘play’, every dis/guising or wilful deception, every mention in dialogue of a theatrical
role or feature, and every moment of daylight performance. Dramatic verse and song
are also metatheatrical, for audiences hearing a song or speech in iambic pentameter
do not postulate some strange versifying madness; they know it is a convention and
accept its composition and delivery as features of a performance by which author and
actor (as much as the speaking role) are to be judged.
This intense metatheatrical awareness in performance is the single most important
feature of the stage- and theatre-design for which Shakespeare structured his works,
and as those designs both drove and constrained his development of plots it is important
to understand how they worked. There is no surviving image of The Theatre (moved
in 1598/99 to become The Globe), but it would have resembled The Swan, shown
in Figure 1 (next page) in the ‘De Witt’ sketch—the only known interior drawing of
an Elizabethan amphitheatre. A vertical axis structured the understage (accessible
through the stage-trap), stage, and half-roof as Hell–Earth–Heavens, while an inset
smaller vertical axis made the first-floor windows of the tiring-house (the ‘building’
behind the stage) an ‘Above’ to the stage (Juliet’s window overlooking her garden,
battlements etc.). One horizontal axis similarly made the tiring-house at stage-level
a ‘Within’ to the stage’s ‘without’ (so unseen actors could call out from ‘inside’ a
building etc.), while a cross-axis provided left- and right-exits, and a double-width
central discovery-space ► (not shown in the sketch). The left/right distinction could
separate factions (Montagues and Englishmen right; Capulets and Frenchmen left),
and informed a convention whereby villains entered left and heroes right. The discovery-space
allowed tableaux to be revealed, large props (such as thrones or beds)
to be thrust on or off, and processions (weddings, funerals) to enter/exit two abreast;
it also allowed central ‘authority entrances’ (arresting the action), and so might be
ab/used by (would-be) rulers, but was also impudently favoured by clowns who
could comically thrust their heads or feet out through its curtains. The stage itself,
about 43 x 27 feet (13 x 8 m) was flat, so there was no ‘up- or ‘down-stage’, but a
Literally: the timbers were disassembled, moved south of the river, and reassembled.
For a detailed discussion of the sketch’s un/reliability see R. A. Foakes, ‘Henslowe’s Rose/
Shakespeare’s Globe’, in Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel, eds, From Script to Stage in Early
Modern England (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 11–31.
‘Stage-trap’: a trap-door in the stage providing access to/from the understage (sometimes called
the ‘Hell’), allowing sudden dis/appearances and perhaps serving e.g. for Ophelia’s grave (see Part
4.7).
Or ‘second-floor’ in normal US usage—i.e. the first raised level, one higher than the stage.
As in the frontispiece to Kirkman’s The Wits (1662); see http://www.britannica.om/eb/art-13689.

Hamlet 16
central ‘command-point’ (pretty much
where the seated figures are placed in
the sketch) allowed actors to be seen
as well as heard by every member of
an audience. Modern practitioners
using similar stages also find it helpful
(especially in crowded scenes) to have
designated paired spaces for higherand
lower-rank interlocutors, so that
orders always come from one place to
be received in another, and acts of defiance,
rebellion, or usurpation can be
expressed by physical relocation and/
or reversal of positions on stage.
The other fundamental thing about
a Jacobethan amphitheatre is the lack
of separation between actors and audience.
Most modern theatres have a
transverse proscenium (‘in front of the
Figure 1 : The ‘De Witt’ sketch of the Swan Theatre, c.1599. scene’) wall dividing the entire build-
[Picture Credit : Utrecht University Library] ing, which is pierced by the proscenium
arch that controls spectators’ sight-lines
and frames the action. On one side of that wall are the stage and its machinery, the
actors’ dressing rooms etc., reached by the stage-door; on the other are the auditorium
and the public areas, and the divide is policed both for security and to control ticketed
access. In amphitheatres there was no such wall or division, so audiences were not
corralled in a block but pressed close to the action, crowding round three sides of the
stage and making any dividing-line between the presented fiction of a play and the
‘real’ world of the theatre very tenuous.
In one other important way Jacobethan amphitheatrical audiences were unlike
most modern audiences: cross-class composition. Nineteenth-century theatre-design
enforced social hierarchisation of audiences in stalls, ‘dress-circle’ (where evening
dress was required), upper circle, and ‘gods’, and by the later twentieth century, with
ticket-pricing as the major agent of exclusion, indoor theatre was in most Anglophone
countries primarily a middle-class recreation. But such exclusion of the ‘unwashed’
from ‘respectable’ theatre had barely begun in Shakespeare’s day, and his first audi-

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